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Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France
by Zeev Sternhell (Translator: David Maisel)
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Princeton University Press (1995-11-28)
ISBN: 0691006296
EAN: 9780691006291
Dewy Decimal #: 320.5330944
Paperback: 440 pages
SKU: 20-7FBU-FLY2
Condition: New
Comments: Brand new softcover. Gift quality. Expedited shipping is available.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
"Few books on European history in recent memory have caused such controversy and commotion," wrote Robert Wohl in 1991 in a major review of Neither Right nor Left. Listed by Le Monde as one of the forty most important books published in France during the 1980s, this explosive work asserts that fascism was an important part of the mainstream of European history, not just a temporary development in Germany and Italy but a significant aspect of French culture as well. Neither right nor left, fascism united antibourgeois, antiliberal nationalism, and revolutionary syndicalist thought, each of which joined in reflecting the political culture inherited from eighteenth-century France. From the first, Sternhell's argument generated strong feelings among people who wished to forget the Vichy years, and his themes drew enormous public attention in 1994, as Paul Touvier was condemned for crimes against humanity and a new biography probed President Mitterand's Vichy connections. The author's new preface speaks to the debates of 1994 and reinforces the necessity of acknowledging the past, as President Chirac has recently done on France's behalf.
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Customer Reviews
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France, the initial incubator of fascist theory!
Rating  (5)
Date: 2004-09-06
14 out of 15 customers found this reveiw helpful
Sternhell who is professor of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem offers an objective inquiry into proto-fascist and fascist ideology in France. This book looks at the intellectual side of fascism as a political phenomenon before the pragmatists like Charles de Gaulle and Francisco Franco came onto the scene. Looking at fascism in its embryonic time of ideological purity so to speak better enables the reader to trace the developments and origins of an ideology shrouded in confusion and spurious interpretations.
What happened in the late nineteenth century was a very pronounced schism amongst socialist activists and theoreticians. Challengers to international Marxism emerged. Socialist ideologies like corporatism, syndicalism and guild socialism found their culmination in fascism as a national alternative. Fascism's popularity in 20th Europe was obvious; the proletariat was far more likely to rally in mass around the tribe or nation than petty abstractions like international labor solidarity. The dynamo of many socialist movements was the coupling of socialism with nationalism, hence Springtime in 1848. Marxists naïvely prophesized the emergence an amalgamated global proletariat who would write off nationalism and the ethnic nation-state as a petty bourgeois construct. Just as the Springtime Revolts of 1848 proved, rallying around the nation-state or the tribe was bound to yield more adherents than the international socialist movement. Sternhell shows that the early socialist theoreticians that gave rise to fascism were essentially Marxist theoretical revisionists who opted for restoring social bonds through corporatism. These thinkers rejected the Marxist dynamic of class struggle and its materialism opting instead to conjure up a new order that would alleviate class conflict and order the national economy. Sternhell effectively conveys what deep roots the fascist phenomenon had in France, which is why his books brought up so much controversy as France has confronted its national sins so to speak. There was immense collaboration between the French and occupying Nazis during WWII since many French were sympathetic to fascist aims. Granted, most of the sympathizers hoped to stave off attacks on French culture and nationalism, and fortify their own parochial fascist ideology whether in Vichy France or occupied France. Sternhell is a Jew yet he shows that Anti-Semitism is not necessarily a hallmark of fascism; Spain's Francisco Franco proves the point as does Vladimar Jabotinsky's violently militant, quasi-fascist Zionist movement in pre-1948 Israel. Though after the Dreyfus affair, the syndicalist forerunners of fascism in France (i.e. Sorel and Valois) were very pronounced in their hatred of Jews. Anyway, Sternhell asserts that fascism was not a distinctive German or Italian aberration, but a significant component of modern European history. Sternhell does not look at the phenomenon through the lens of political correctness or Marxist-Leninist historical revisionism. Sternhell rather recognizes fascism's roots amongst socialist theoreticians like Sorel and De Man. The dubious caricatures of fascism by as being the wellspring of conservative capitalists hoping to supplant the socialist movement with a socialist pretender to thwart communist revolution are rather absurd on the surface when one sees the anti-bourgeoisie and socialist roots of fascism. Yet this interpretation is increasingly dominant in academia. Sternhell eschews such a reductionist interpretation that obfuscates history and historical fact. For starters, fascism was anti-bourgeoisie, anti-conservative, and anti-liberal. Fascism like Marxism sought to create a New Man. It is a breath of fresh air to have intellectual honesty in the inquiry into fascism and not another hothead erroneously painting fascism as a capitalist, conservative, bourgeoisie phenomenon which it is not. Sternhell accurately conveys the leftist-socialist origins of embryonic fascism, but he explains fascism as a mutation straying from Marxism. As socialist in-fighting over "what kind of socialism" raged, the proto-fascists started rallying around their own camp, and after WWII they become precariously heterodox to the established left-wing. (However, if fascism was right-wing, it was to the right of Marxism by only a few inches.) The whole right-left dichotomy of the political spectrum is reductionist abstraction that has the potential to confuse. Thus, this book's title captures how far removed this movement was from the conventional ordering of things. Sternhell's role as an objective historian is to be commended.
Moreover, in its heyday, the theorizing of these French socialists provided much inspiration to the Italian movement of Mussolini. Like their progressive cousins across the Atlantic, they were naively obsessed with rationalizing the economy, and central planning schemes of organizing production. With regards to the cultural side of fascism, the movement represented a revolt against the dominant liberal bourgeoisie culture that had taken in the 19th century.
The title Neither Right Nor Left conveys the reality Fascism doesn't fit the conventional mold of the political spectrum. Fascism was complex, multi-faceted, and marked with some pronounced contradictions. For example, Deat's catchphrase Ordre, Autorite, and Nation was deliberately articulated to supplant that revolutionary slogan of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity erstwhile theoreticians like Valois proclaimed fascism to be the heir of the movement of 1789 (i.e. The French Revolution.) Both Deat and Valois shared the common anti-parliamentarian ideology and professed a desire to fuse socialism with nationalism. All things considered, Sternhell has made a sound contribution to the realm of history and political science adding clarity (rather than more fog and haze)to understanding the origins of the fascist phenomenon in France and Europe. Many fascists were anti-clerical, though even some non-Christians in the French movements came to embrace the Catholic Church as a traditional force for tethering together the bonds of a national community. If I can impart a recommendation for understanding the ideological origins of fascism than this would be one of the integral works on the subject. However, it is very intellectual in nature.
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